The Stars Are Fading
by Penn Flinn
Summary: "All of my knowledge and I can't save him." Bones sleeps, and Bones dreams. The nightmares don't get any easier now that it's Jim Kirk in the hospital bed. (STID-verse, post-revival. Spoilers for STID and The Final Frontier. Trio friendship, possible prelude to "It Goes On." One-shot.)


**Hey loves! Long time no see. Because of the demanding nature of college life, I have not had a whole lot of time to write, but I watched ****_The Final Frontier_**** for the first time the other night and got hit with this lovely plot bunny. So here it is for your enjoyment (or emotional distress; I'm not promising anything).**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Star Trek. A few lines of dialogue are taken from ****_Star Trek V: The Final Frontier_**** and, therefore, similarly do not belong to me.**

**Time frame: STID-verse, about a week after Jim's revival. If you're feeling particularly masochistic, this story could also be a prelude to my story ****_It Goes On_****.**

**Enjoy!**

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The world swirled into color, and on the bed a few feet away, a man lay dying.

Bones stood cautiously, his heart thudding painfully in his chest. The lights of the hospital were too bright, and they reflected off of every white surface. He'd always hated that about hospitals. As much as he loved sterility, it was unsettling to see so much pureness surrounding sick and broken forms.

He walked forward slowly, and every footstep clicked definitively on the too-clean floor. He kept his eyes trained on the window that was just behind the biobed—in contrast to the harsh hospital lights and white walls, a dark city sat sprawled just beyond the glass. In the confines of midnight, lights winked across buildings, streets, and a partially-hidden moon.

It was beautiful, but as soon as Bones reached the biobed, he forced his eyes downward.

"Leonard," the old man in the bed croaked. The pale skin of his face stretched thinly over his bones, riddled with age spots and wrinkles. Sparse tufts of gray hair were splayed across his pillow. "_Leonard_."

"I'm here," Bones said. He set one hand down on the edge of the bed to steady himself. "I'm here, Dad."

David McCoy blinked once. His eyes were clouded, the muscles in his face tight as he regarded his son. "Leonard."

"I'm with you." Bones swallowed heavily. "It's going to be okay, Dad."

His father's head tilted infestiminally to the side. "The pain…stop the pain."

An iron hand curled into a fist in Bones' stomach, and a familiar dread threatened to buckle his knees. He knew this scene.

"I've done everything I can," he said. "You've got to hang on."

This, he mused, was the worst part of being a doctor. The waiting game. Knowing that survival was in the patient's hands alone, unsure if, really, survival was still the best outcome.

The elder McCoy's face crumpled. "I can't…I can't stand the pain. Please."

The scene was unfolding too rapidly, time rippling the hairs on the back of Bones' neck as it passed. He wished, illogically, that he could hold on to it. He closed his eyes, the intensity of his father's stare burning even through the darkness.

_All of my knowledge and I can't save him._

He was alive. Wasn't that enough?

_This isn't really alive._

Bones opened his eyes, and his blood chilled.

The scene in front of him had changed, and instead of his father's weary gray eyes looking at him, now he was faced with the vibrant blue that was unique to only one in the universe.

"Bones…" the voice croaked.

"God, Jim," Bones said, this time his legs buckling completely. He fell to his knees at the bedside, fists curling in the papery sheets. "No…"

"The pain…" the voice of his friend echoed. "Stop the pain."

Bones forced himself to look up at the emaciated figure in the bed, his trained doctor's eye assessing every inch of the scene. Red patches over too-pale skin. Atrophied muscles in the arms. Droplets of sweat around the hairline. Bones looked upward at the medical readouts.

"The serum didn't work," he said weakly. "God damnit, Jim, stay with me. We can try something else."

Eyes partially glazed, deepened by large shadows, Jim looked imploringly at Bones. "I can't stand it…I can't stand the pain anymore. Please."

"No…" Bones muttered, burying his face in the sheets. "No, Jim."

"You've done…all you can," Jim said, and the frailty in his voice drove an unbearable ache into Bones' heart. "I don't want to live…like this." A groan as he shifted in his biobed. "You're my doctor."

"I'm your friend," Bones said miserably into the sheets, his face suddenly covered in a moist warmth.

As he kneeled there at his vigil as in prayer, his body trembling with sobs, he felt a quivering hand rest on the top of his head. "You're my Bones."

Bones lifted his head from the sheets and met Jim's tired gaze, just a sliver of his friend's trademark smile cracking through the mask of pain.

"Please."

All at once, Bones knew how Spock had felt sitting there on the wrong side of the glass.

Bones stood and held his friend's too-fragile hand. The doctor in him, the professional, entered the code. The professional watched the innocuous blink of light as the life support systems were shut off.

The human part of him broke as his friend's eyes met his own for the last time, grateful and relieved and weary, and closed.

Bones woke sweating.

It took him a moment to take in his surroundings; the knot of dread was heavy in his throat, threatening to choke him, and his eyes felt unnaturally puffy. He swiped a hand over his face and readjusted himself in his chair. A hospital chair. Of course. The nightmares were pretty frequent nowadays, but hospital chairs never helped.

The real world now established around him, he squinted through the darkness of the private room. The constant light of the biobed monitors cast an eerie blue light over the peaceful rising and falling of Jim Kirk's chest.

The Captain, though far from what Bones would deem "alright," was currently slack and unaware in the depths of sleep, the corners of his mouth turned downward slightly. On instinct, still prickled by the lingering effects of the nightmare, Bones rose to administer another dose of a mild painkiller. Jim would never admit to needing it himself.

The gray light of dawn was beginning to break outside the window. The lingering moonlight accentuated the streaks of gray at Jim's temples, streaks that no one had acknowledged and that would likely be treated with artificial color the moment Jim was out of the hospital. The gray hair was unsettlingly reminiscent of that of David McCoy, now eerily projected onto a much younger face.

Radiation would do that to a person.

"Nightmare, Doctor?"

Bones whipped around.

"God damnit, Spock," he said in a dramatic whisper. "You could at least announce your presence."

"Irrelevant, as I have been here for quite some time now."

Bones exhaled irritably and sat back down in his chair. "Why?"

"I have approximately two hours before my meeting with Admiral Archer," Spock said. "I was simply paying a visit to the Captain to inquire if he would be agreeable to a game of chess."

"Yeah, well, he sleeps odd hours," Bones said, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to rub away all lingering images of the dream.

A moment of silence, then the light sound of a form taking a seat beside him. "As do we all, it seems," Spock said quietly. "This is not the first of these dreams."

"No shit," Bones grumbled.

There was another silence. After a few seconds, Bones raised his head from his hands. Spock was looking at him with a curious expression that could only mean trouble.

"What?" the doctor asked.

Hesitantly, as if uncertain of both his actions and of Bones', Spock lifted one hand. "May I?"

It was the gentlest Bones had ever heard Spock, save for choice interactions with a more fragile Jim at the beginning stages of his recovery. He looked in the Vulcan's eyes for a moment, startled by the pure human curiosity and instinct he found there.

He, too, vacillated for a moment, but the human part in him crumbled and won out.

He waved a hand. "Vulcan voodoo," he muttered, breaking his gaze. He sniffed. "I can't guarantee you'll find anything good in there."

Spock assessed this reaction, paused, and seemed to realize Bones' acceptance. With a profound calmness and gentleness, he reached out his hand, and his fingertips met Bones' face.

The dream was no easier on replay.

He wrenched away from contact when dream-Jim's eyes closed and face slackened, breathing heavily in the swiftly-lightening reality. He refused to look at Spock, whose normally-even breaths were also quickened.

"Your father…" the Vulcan began.

"I took him off life support," Bones said to empty space. "I killed him."

"He was—"

"Alive until that point," Bones snapped. "Not long after, they found a cure. _A goddamned cure._" He quieted. "He might have lived."

There were a few seconds of terse quiet, interrupted only by the shifting of Jim's blankets and the beeping of the heart monitor.

Then Spock's voice: "But Jim is alive."

Bones lifted his eyes to the prone form on the biobed. The heart monitors sped up gradually and his friend's chest rose once heavily, then released on a sigh. His eyes fluttered open. They searched around the ceiling hazily for a moment, disoriented, before shifting sideways and meeting Bones' gaze.

Spock's unspoken words hung in the air: _You saved him_.

Upon recognizing the doctor, Jim broke into a grin. "Hey, Bonesy."

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**Thank you for reading! Stop by and drop a line if you're feeling particularly generous; I love hearing from you all, and I am still taking requests for stories...**

**As always, thanks for your support!**

**Till next time,**

**-Penn**


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